Ultra Aequinoxialem Non Peccari: anarchy, state of nature and the construction of the space political order

Abstract

The 16th Century saying ultra aequinoxialem non peccari – there is no sin below the equator – shows more than a difference between a South, the place of vice, and a virtuous North. It expresses a spatial location system that, using the Tropic of Cancer, delimits two worlds: one on the North, ruled by the European Law of Nations that orders the use of violence and regulates the relations between territorial States; the other one on the South, where these rules do not apply, and where violence could be used by European States as they stormed the New World. Later on, such domination process would be justified by the theorists of social contract using a different cleavage: non-contractual societies inhabiting the South of the Tropic of Cancer; contractual societies living on its North. This produced an understanding that Southern people lived in an anarchical situation, corresponding to their state of nature, which authorized colonizers to enforce a new social order by violent means. Taking this process into account, this essay aims to analyze the extend of both anarchy and state of nature ideas to international relations, and by these means to understand the consequences of South-North relations on defining the idea of international.